1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to moving picture search support devices. More particularly, the invention is directed to a moving picture search support device that allows a particular scene or frame to be searched quickly and surely from a moving picture file that has been accessed in the past.
2. Description of the Related Art
It often happens that a user must search a desired scene or frame to his personal interest or for office use from among moving picture files such as video films that have been viewed in the past. By the way, in this case, the conventional searching technique is to rely on the user's weak memory while repeating the forwarding or reproducing of a target moving picture file, which, however, is a very inefficient technique.
To improve such inefficient technique, the following techniques have been proposed. (1) Changes in scene are detected on a display screen by using a time-related correlation of an image (A. Nagasaka and Y. Tanaka (Engineering Department, Hokkaido University), "A Method of Automatically Detecting Changes in Scene in Video Films," 40th National Convention of Information Processing Society (First Term, 1990), pp. 642-643). (2) The motion of a moving body on a display screen is extracted, and a desired scene or frame is searched using such extracted motion (H. Ueda (of Central Research Institute, Hitachi, Ltd.), "Proposal of an Interactive Method of Editing Moving Pictures," Institute of Electronics and Communication Engineers of Japan Technical Research Report [Image Engineering], pp. 39 to 46).
However, these techniques require that predetermined image processing be performed every frame that expresses an image, and this entails enormous time.